"The BeOS obsession is still an unsolved mystery to me. I threw open the crypt and ventured inside, but I left without revelation. Once I got ZETA to boot, yes, it ran reasonably fast, but whatever bug infects people with love for this OS didn't bite."
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Member since:2005-07-06
ah, a microkernel. should have figured. then it truely is impressive that it have the speed it have.
still, can beos display the gui from a app running on a diffrent system across the network?
i still have a feel that there is more then the xorg or whatever thats to blame for the appearant laggyness of *nix guis...
Member since:It's no mystery how a microkernal OS can be so responsive. The answer is simply that the GUI was their number one priority.
And the app-server guy and the kernel guy had adjacent cubes. That helped.
If you really want the OS to be responsive you can make it happen, if you start from scratch. But once the event model is settled it's harder to optimize a GUI. Example: back in 1998 I wrote BeOS software that used a TV tuner card, and set up a DMA program to *bampf* the video straight from the tuner to the video card. This was a supported feature in most TV tuner cards.
The problem was that every time the TV window was resized, or another window passed over the TV window, the DMA program had to be revised. On BeOS this was not an issue: you just reset the program the moment the window received an event.
On WinNT, however, this was impossible---it just couldn't track its own UI events fast enough. It could take a huge fraction of a second for your app to get the opportunity to reset the DMA after a window was moved. So the video card came with a demo TV viewer program for WinNT, where the video lagged along behind the window when you dragged it. Plus the window was always-on-top to avoid having to figure out clipping regions. The event model simply didn't allow the hardware to be updated fast enough.
You can still see this today in XP. Just play a WMV file and drag the window around. At least it's clipped, but you'll still see the video sit still as the window moves out of the way.
Caj
Member since:
all servers are running in user space.
only little parts of modular drivers do run in kernel space, and part of network stack is implemented as set of kernel-space modules.